"Often cast as the peacemaker in free software disputes, Bruce Perens is on the warpath. When we caught up with him, he wasn't in a mood to be charitable to Novell. On Friday the Utah company, which markets the SuSE Linux distribution, revealed that it was entering into a partnership with Microsoft. Redmond would pay Novell an undisclosed sum in return for Novell recognizing Microsoft's intellectual property claims. Novell received a 'Covenant' promising that it wouldn't be sued by Microsoft."It's a case of 'Damn the people who write the software'", he told us. "Novell is in a desperate position - it has a smaller share of the market than Debian,"" he told The Register. Update: Novell responds to community's questions: here, here and here. Update 2: Havoc Pennington's take.

"And I really enjoy mocking those who profess to want "open standards" but think Microsoft is EVIL for submitting OpenXML and .NET to ECMA"

There isn't anything wrong with OpenXML and .NET in and of themselves.

The problem is the fact that these supposedly "open" standards call up supporting functionality that is not open, in fact proprietary and Windows-only, and that is their failing.

As just one example ... ODF relies on SVG and SMIL. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument"Many of the components it is built on (such as SMIL for audio and multimedia and SVG for vector graphics)"
... which in turn are open W3C standards.

In contrast, the supporting functionality that OpenXML and .NET rely upon are sometimes Windows-only proprietary functions. ActiveX is but one example of a Windows-only OOXML dependency.

I don't think Microsoft is EVIL here. They are, however, seeking to obscure that their "alternative open standards", while in theory are open for anyone to implement, are in fact only open for anyone to implement for a Windows platform.

This is clearly in Microsoft's best interest (and Microsoft I suppose are entitled to act in Microsoft's best interest), but none of that changes the fact that we as end users should look to our own best interests also ... and given Microsoft's attempts to continue lock-in to Microsoft platforms, our best interests as end users is clearly served by avoiding OOXML.